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Saudi Newsreader Says Muslims Responsible For Terrorism

A Saudi Arabian television newsreader interrupted her own program recently to urge Muslims to take responsibility for terrorist attacks.

Pointing to attacks in Paris, France, and Brussels, Belgium, in the past six months, Nadine Al-Budair said the perpetrators could not be dismissed as a minority, Daily Mail reported.

Al-Budair gave a three-minute speech in which she called on Muslims to stop “shredding their conscience.”

“Whenever terrorism massacres peaceful civilians, the smart alecs and the hypocrites vie with one another in saying that these people do not represent Islam or the Muslims,” she continued, according to the Daily Mail.

“Perhaps one of them could tell us who does represent Islam and the Muslims,” she added.

Al-Budair has spoken out previously in her column for a Kuwaiti newspaper on the same issue. In the column, she told Muslims to stop blaming the west for their problems.

“Don't these perpetrators emerge from our environment?," she said on the television broadcast. "Don't their families belong to our society?”

“After the abominable Brussels bombings, it's time for us to feel shame and to stop acting as if the terrorists are a rarity,” Al-Budair added.

“We must admit that they are present everywhere, that their nationality is Arab and that they adhere to the religion of Islam,” she said.

“We must acknowledge that we are the ones who gave birth to them,” she concluded.

Other reports on the origins of terrorists and their networks suggest a more complex picture. The perpetrators of the Paris and Brussels attacks were natives of European countries who became radicalized and traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State before returning home to carry out terrorist acts, The Washington Post noted.

More recruits to the Islamic State have come from France than any other European country, according to POLITICO.

In Sevran, a suburb of Paris with a population of around 50,000, ten people have traveled to Syria, seven of whom have been confirmed killed. The neighborhood has an unemployment rate of more than 20 percent and high crime rates.

Salah Abdeslam, the suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks who was arrested four days before the Brussels bombings, is a Belgian national, according to The Washington Post. Several terrorist attacks in recent years have been linked to Belgian nationals.

The leader of the Paris attacks was a native of the Molenbeek district in Brussels, another area with significant levels of militants.